Advanced Configuration Properties

Andrew Downes

December 07, 2018 11:05

Advanced Configuration in Explore enables precise control over creating and editing reports by providing options unavailable in Simple Configuration. Using JSON, choose what data should be included in reports and configure how that data is displayed.

Advanced Dimensions

Several reports (such as Leaderboard and Correlation) aggregate data using dimensions and measures. In Simple Configuration, dimensions are represented by the Organized field. Data can be organized by person, group, day, week, month, year, activity or activity type. If the dimension you need is not on that list, you can use Advanced Configuration to create a custom dimension. Learn how to set up Advanced Dimensions.

Advanced Measures

Several reports (such as Leaderboard and Correlation) aggregate data using dimensions and measures. In Simple Configuration, measures are represented by the measures dropdown and list, or simply as two dropdowns in the case of the Correlation report.

TimeZone

The timeZone property sets the timezone used by the report. It can also be configured within the date section of Simple Configuration.

Color

The colors used in Watershed reports can be customized at the whole account, measure and report level.

Customization at the report level is done using the colors Advanced Configuration property. This includes a list of valid CSS colors to be used in reports. For example the code below is used to set the chart colors to red, blue and green.

"colors": [
"red",
"#00ff00",
"rgb(0,0,255)"
]

Caching

Report results are cached to improve performance. By default the cache duration is 1 hour, which means that when you view a report, data can be up to an hour old. You can adjust the number of minutes data will be cached for by using the cachingMinutes property. This contains an integer number of minutes Watershed will wait before checking for new data. Decrease this to get more immediate results; increase it to improve the speed and performance of your dashboard.

Additional Statement Properties

For the most part, Watershed's filters, dimensions and measures use the properties defined as part of xAPI statements. There are some additional properties that Watershed adds to the data for the purposes of reporting. Most of these are added within the statement's actor property and include additional metadata about the person who the statement is about.

Person metadata can be accessed using the actor.person property. actor.person.id matches the Watershed id of the person the statement is about. actor.person.name matches the name of the person the statement is about as defined within Watershed. This can sometimes be different from the value of actor.name, which is the name of the actor as defined in the xAPI statement. actor.person.email matches the email address as defined in Watershed. Unlike actor.mbox, actor.person.email is not prefixed with "mailto:" and therefore looks nicer in reports.

Another peice of metadata that can be accessed is the number of centiseconds represented by the result.duration property. In xAPI result.duration is measured using an ISO 8601 duration string such as 'PT6H34M65.56S'. As this can include hours, minutes, seconds, or even years, months and weeks, it can be difficult to compare duration values in reports. Watershed therefore adds a result.durationCentiseconds property that translates the duration into centiseconds (100th's of a second) to be more easily compared in reports.

Please note: The calculation of result.durationCentiseconds assumes that the duration includes no leap time such as leap years and leap seconds.

Watershed also has special behavior when it comes to language maps, such as the object.definition.name property. With language map properties, rather than configuring the specific language (e.g. object.definition.name.en), you only need to configure the language map itself (e.g. object.definition.name) and Watershed will choose from the languages available. This makes it much easier to work with data that includes a mix of language tags such as en and en-US.